This Woman was Scammed for More Than $128,000 — All too often, scammers are successful because their lies are so convincingly real. This may include a website that seems extremely robust, realistic, and representing an industry, such as cryptocurrency investments. We’re sorry to report a story about a 33-year old woman who was scammed for more than $80,000 USD and didn’t realize the depth of the fraud until we informed her about it.

Several months ago, a woman we will call Anastasia, heard from an acquaintance about a fantastic website through which she could purchase and track cryptocurrencies. The acquaintance, who suggested making an investment in this platform, said she was a 28-year old woman. The two of them met on Twitter in July. The 28-year old was also an investor and suggested that Anastasia invest in some IPO (initial public offering) coins through a trading site called BITEEB.com. The acquaintance actually gave Anastasia an invitation code so that she could create an account on this platform, because otherwise, she said, she wouldn’t be able to invest. Anastasia made her first investment on July 24 through BITEEB.com. In their own words, BITEEB says that they provide the “highest quality digital asset trading services for users throughout the world.” They also say they are “committed to providing a safe, fair open and efficient blockchain digital asset trading environment.” Anastasia was intrigued and decided to make an investment worth more than $80,000 USD.  

During the next few weeks, Anastasia watched her funds grow in value at unbelievable rates!  By the end of August, her account of cryptocurrencies had grown to more than $435,000 in value! She thought it would be a good idea to begin to withdraw some of her money to take advantage of her remarkable earnings. That’s when she discovered unexpected problems. As she told us…”When you want to withdraw your money, [BITEEB] makes you pay taxes for that amount, then after you pay it, they make you pay another fee to secure your account and promises you that it’s the last one. After you pay the second one, they send you an email that you have to pay a third fee. It is a scam. [They are] doing everything possible so you can’t withdraw your money. They don’t want you to be able to withdraw your money. I tried to withdraw my money and it won’t let me. This BITEEB platform is a big scam.”

Here is a screenshot showing the current value of Anasatia’s account:

We also learned from Anastasia that she was unexpectedly required to pay two sets of taxes on her earnings. These taxes appeared in her account. The first was for $27,000, while the second tax was for $10,000. And also unexpectedly, she was then hit with a third “tax” of $20,000 but could only pay $10,680 of it.  As a result of not paying the full $20,000 in taxes, she told us that BITEEB is threatening to take the entire amount of $435,000. Anastasia did not give us any details to explain what these taxes were for and why they were so frequent. We don’t think she expected these “taxes” and other fees to be charged against her account. Taken together, Anastasia has paid BITEEB more than $128,000 USD.

Let’s dig a bit deeper into the BITEEB.com cryptocurrency trading website to look for signs of fraud.  This very robust website tracks dozens of cryptocurrencies by the minute to keep account holders updated. They say they have been in service for 5 years, and manage cryptocurrencies for “millions of users in over 130 countries worldwide.”

We believe that BITEEB.com is lying.  Here’s why…

1. Search engines like Google know NOTHING about this website!  Google shows no reviews, no information on news sites, banking review sites, etc. BITEEB.com is not mentioned in any articles about cryptocurrencies that we can find. Also, Scam-Detector.com gives BITEEB.com a low trust rating based on evaluating many factors, including proximity to other suspicious websites, its low popularity and much more.

    

2. The BITEEB.com website says that they have 5 years of experience, meaning that it was founded sometime in 2017. And yet, the bottom of their website also says that it was copyrighted in 2020.  Both of these dates are lies! A WHOIS lookup of the domain, biteeb.com, shows that it was first registered in late April of this year. Their website is about 4 months old and was published about 3 months before Anastasia heard about the investment site!

3. At the bottom of their website are important links you would expect to find on any business website, such as “About Us.”  The most important of four links do NOTHING at all. They are just text on the webpage. The links that do not work are “About Us” “User Support” “Help Center” and “Contact us.” Don’t you think these links are critical for this service’s credibility?

4. Also, though it may seem minor, we can’t help but wonder why the email listed at the bottom of their website is a free Gmail account, and NOT an email associated with their domain. This is unusual for a business.

Of course, Anastasia’s experience has us wondering about the “acquaintance” she met on Twitter but we have no more information about the woman.

We reached out to Anastasia again just a couple of days ago and suggested that she try to take out small amounts of money from the hundreds of thousands that remain in her account. We wondered if she she might be able to recover small amounts of her original investment. Sadly, she told us “If you want to take it out, this is what happens, it blocks you!”  She sent us the following screenshots showing her “Application for withdrawal of currency” made twice on August 19th. In response, she received an email from BITEEB.com telling her that she had to transfer an ADDITIONAL $20,000 to protect the security of her funds!  This is, of course, a scam! She’s still waiting for her withdrawal to be approved.

We know that many of our readers would never fall for this type of scam and are very aware of the many risky websites and circumstances surrounding the cryptocurrency market. For example, just a few days ago, we received a very suspicious email about crypto investments from someone who identified himself as “Mr. S. Martins Bruxy.” But his email has the username “shola martins 81” and he never identified his business website. Mr. Bruxy believes he can triple our investment in just seven business days! CAVEAT EMPTOR!

Footnotes: Check out the text scams below in our Textplosion section about cryptocurrency investments. Also, read: FBI Publication from July 18, 2022 about Cryptocurrency Investment scams – pdf file

Top Scams & Phishing Schemes of the Week– Scams of the week: Costco, Shell, SSA, Louis Vuitton, blogdodge[.]shop, and Gmail – can you spot all the scams? Use our FREE, all-in-one tool to combat scams with ease!

Scammers Have a Multitude of Ways to Target You! – We urge our readers to teach their family members and friends never to respond to random texts or calls (voice messages) from people they don’t know! (If you are expecting a call from a contractor, consumer service, etc., just let it go to voicemail and then respond as needed to the message.)  Here are just two recent examples. One of our readers received this one-word text from 406-478-8776 simply saying “Hi” and offering a handshake emoji.  This simple lure is very often used to try to engage people, looking for those who are gullible enough to respond and then it becomes “game on” for the scammer.

Another random example is this voice message left with one of our readers, who then sent it to us.  

The recipient was asked to call a man back at 717-946-9117. Some of you may think we’re being overly cautious and this was likely just a mistaken wrong number phone call.  Why then, did more than twenty people report the same message on 800notes.com!  This “call me back” message is a scammer’s technique.

It is also important to raise awareness that scammers target us by pretending to be our friends, relatives and colleagues from work!  Here’s a recent example sent to us by a reader. A woman named Tracy was contacted by someone she knew who asked for her help running an errand. However, she immediately recognized that Alexander’s email address wasn’t the email she associated with him!  She reached out to him through his real email to ask if he had sent her this request and he said no!

And finally, we think it is important to pay attention to subtle hints and read “between the lines” to help you recognize online fraud.  Our example comes from a recent email targeting us at TheDailyScam.com. We got this security alert last week from a webserver in Peru. (Notice the 2-letter country code “.pe” in the FROM email address.)  Someone requested that we disable one of our email addresses that we use for people to report a certain type of shipping scam! Oh Dear! But mousing over the link to “VERIFY ACCOUNT” shows that it points to a website called mxHemlock[.]com!  Yikes! Isn’t Hemlock poisonous?  “Is this a dagger which I see before me?” 

Wixsite Response to Phishing Claims, CitiBank, and Intuit’s Qickbooks Invoice! – Last week, one of our readers reported this lame phishing email to us, targeting Comcast Communications Xfinity customers. By mousing over the link to “READ VOICE,” we noticed that it pointed to a misused webpage at the free service called Wixsite.com.  We decided to do a good deed and report the phishing page to the Wix support staff so they could remove it.  We were shocked by the tech’s reply to use form Wix!  Check out below what he told us and our response to him!

Kohl’s Department Store & Dick’s Sporting Goods – NOT! – Receive a $90 reward by answering this survey from Kohls Department store! But this email didn’t come from Kohls or any legitimate marketing service.  Take a look at that INSANE domain name used in the FROM address!  Also, the links in this malicious clickbait point to the first-ever link-shortening service called TinyURL.com. If you were to click that malicious link, you’ld be sent to a site in the United Kingdom (UK).  Sound like Kohl’s department store to you?  We didn’t think so either.  Delete.

For a while we were seeing lots of emails disguised as offers from Dick’s Sporting Goods to answer a survey and win products.  All of them were 100% malicious! As much as we would have wanted to get a real deal from Dick’s Sporting Goods, we’ve only received malicious clickbait!  Boo, hoo.  We loved their funny grammatical error at the top of the email though!

I Have Been Watching You… –Oh no! Someone identified as “nskalpha2” is targeting us with extortion!  He claims to “have been watching” us and recorded us cheating on our spouses! (Though we’re not sure which one of us he claims is doing the cheating.) Oh Dear! If we share this message with anybody else, he “will broadcast your video as mentioned above.” Wow, we guess that threat is clear! Hey, nskalpha2, show us the video! Or maybe we should contact nskalpha1 to see if he has it?

Invest in Crypto Currency – These texts came from random stranger’s Hotmail and Outlook email accounts. They are inviting us to join discussion groups about investing in cryptocurrencies. Gee, they sure seem legitimate, don’t they? 

Until next week, surf safely!

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